Lalla Essaydi, Converging Territories #11, 2003, 80.6 x 99.1 cm, courtesy the artist and Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York © Lalla Essaydi
Lalla Essaydi’s Converging Territories #11 is a photograph that immediately captures the viewers’ attention through its large scale, monochromatic tones, and radiating lines of text that unify the composition. The image depicts three seated women with long, dark, wavy hair. The camera’s lens is positioned slightly above the figures and directed down at them. We can see the face of the woman on the left in the profile. She seems deeply involved with the ongoing activity, undisturbed by the camera’s presence. Only a tiny portion of the middle figure’s face is visible, and we cannot see the face of the figure on the right at all. Her voluminous hair dominates the right side of the image instead. The two figures in the foreground are shown solemnly applying brown paint (located in a bowl near the center of the image) with thin brushes to the garment of the figure in the center. All three of the women are covered with the same creamy white fabric with lines of text written in stylized Arabic. Their hands and faces are covered with the same style of writing as well. The text continues on the textiles, covering the floor and the background wall, thus uniting, obscuring, and “converging” the bodies in the space where this activity is taking place.
Converging Territories #11 is relatively simple, yet remarkably powerful. What looks like a casual and intimate photograph is actually a carefully created image that utilizes both calligraphy and photography. It is an early example from Essaydi’s career, which has been dedicated to an artistic intervention of oppressive systems in both her own culture (she is originally from Morocco) and in the West.
Calligraphy and gender
As the brown hues of the stylized writings seen here reveal, the artist applies henna to the photograph (instead of a carbon or metal-based ink traditionally used in Islamic calligraphy). This is significant since henna is a dye of a North African origin that women traditionally apply for body adornments to celebrate key life moments such as births and weddings in various cultures of SWANA and South Asia.
Tughra (Official Signature) of Sultan Süleiman the Magnificent from Istanbul, c. 1555–60, ink, opaque watercolor, and gold on paper, 52.1 x 64.5 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
Calligraphy has historically been an important artistic practice in Muslim cultures. Many powerful dynasties in history employed talented calligraphers in their courts. In addition to religious texts and historical accounts, official documents such as imperial decrees, endowments, and treaties were written with highly specialized and stylized calligraphy. Although women calligraphers (such as Esma Ibret Hanim) are known, calligraphy was a male-dominated field largely inaccessible to women.
Essaydi applies calligraphy, historically used to celebrate the words of God and the accomplishments of powerful men, with henna, which is primarily used by women. Combining these two artistic traditions unexpectedly and uniquely, Essaydi centers her stories and those of other Moroccan women.
A portion of the text from Converging Territories reads:
I am writing. I am writing on me. I am writing on her. The story began to be written the moment the present began… [1]
Essaydi creates such texts in collaboration with her models, who are close friends and family members. In the selected spaces (a family home in the village of Tameslouht, Morocco in this case), they would spend days engaged in long conversation. Then, the artist finalized the texts by reflecting on these interactions. Essaydi claims that her technique is “a feminist strategy to lay claim to the voices of women … [whose] bodies are constantly overwritten by the discourses of others.” [2] In Converging Territories #11, the models also pose as actively writing, further emphasizing their agency. As women in contemporary Morocco and around the world continue to challenge restrictions imposed on them by men, Essaydi converts her calligraphic henna into an expressive tool in an act of resistance.
Eugène Delacroix, Women of Algiers, 1834, oil on canvas, 180 x 229 cm (Musée du Louvre, Paris)
Challenging Orientalism
Converging Territories #11 is an early example of Essaydi’s critical reading of 19th-century Orientalist paintings and photographs. Orientalism is a term coined by Edward Said that refers to European representations of SWANA in a stereotyped way and as a reflection of European fantasies. Orientalist paintings often depicted women and children as sexualized objects, and the artists’ naturalistic styles and almost invisible brushstrokes made such paintings appear real. When Eugène Delacroix’s Women of Algiers was displayed at the 1834 Paris Salon, contemporary critics applauded its ethnographic approach and attention to detail. Despite his naturalistic rendering of individual figures and objects, the composition was mostly a product of European imagination and fantasy. The lavishly decorated room, sitting and reclining women with loose garments and gold jewelry, and the items such as the narghile (smoking pipe) contributed to the presentation of the SWANA region as one stuck in ancient traditions in contrast to Europe, which represented itself as scientifically, culturally, and socially progressive. [3] However such a contrast was primarily fictional and Europe was in fact repressive, particularly regarding the status of women’s rights.
Photography and mass-printing technologies made images of Orientalist imaginations available and affordable to a large market. Postcards depicting staged scenes of women surrounded by various exotic-looking objects and decorations with titles such as Femmes au Harem (The Harem Women) were popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In these photographs, women dressed in traditional garments would be shown in tight spaces filled with vases, pillows, tea and coffee sets, tambourines, and narghiles, usually brought from various locations.
The term “harem” refers to a separate part of a Muslim household reserved for women. Male European artists were not allowed in such private spaces and thus could not have taken photographs of women there. The models, who were often Europeans, made direct eye contact with the viewer. This, along with the title, the props, and the intimate setting, was an indicator of women being sexually available. Therefore, we should interpret these carefully staged photographs as reflections of European fantasies, not as real images from the daily lives of the women in the SWANA region.
Fix & David, Postcard labeled as Femmes au Harem (The Harem Women), c. 1900, calotype (photo: public domain)
With its ability to capture scenes almost simultaneously, photography has long been used and understood as a tool that can provide us with an unmediated copy of the real world, thus providing authentic and objective knowledge. Starting in the late 19th century, it was used to bring awareness to social issues, such as poverty and unfair labor practices. As we have seen in the case of the Femmes au Harem postcard, however, photography can be manipulated to fulfill the fantasies of the target audiences and strengthen their stereotypical notions about people from other parts of the world.
In Converging Territories #11, Essaydi removes all architectural decorations and luxurious objects that she claims made Orientalist images “so beautiful and so dangerous.” [4] She replaces such details with textiles covered in calligraphic texts, creating a space that is carefully staged. The women are shown engaged in an activity of writing instead of simply sitting or reclining. They look at each other, not at the viewer. Finally, their bodies are completely covered, refusing to be the subjects of a masculine and heterosexual view. They merge, instead, into this space as the lines of texts become topographic contours and convert them into hills in a landscape of converging territories.
Challenging the objectivity of photography
Just like the Orientalist artists, Essaydi meticulously stages her photographs, including Converging Territories #11. However, she makes her efforts obvious to disrupt the notion that photography is a window to reality. She does so by preserving the dark frame of each photograph, with its original numbers, letters, and the brand of the film visible. In traditional practice, photographers would have carefully cropped these borders. Essaydi, on the other hand, intentionally leaves such frames in her final prints and further manipulates them in the darkroom to add a rough texture imitating the photographs of the 19th century.
Through the uncut black frames, Essaydi reminds the viewer of the subjective agency of the creator behind each photograph. In her artistic practice, she carefully chooses locations and participants, creates spaces and garments with carefully applied calligraphic texts reflecting on her personal and collective experiences, and finalizes her images while revealing their film frames. In an honest approach, this is Essaydi’s declaration that Converging Territories #11 is not a window opening into an exotic world, but a carefully crafted artwork created in collaboration with Moroccan women.
